Palestine: History of a Name and a People

Simcha Jacobovici is a Canadian-Israeli filmmaker and journalist. He is a three-time Emmy winner for “Outstanding Investigative Journalism” and a New York Times best selling author. He’s also an adjunct professor
in the Department of Religion at Huntington University, Ontario.
Times of Israel, From Simcha Jacobovici, August 8 2013

I’ve recently condemned the focus on Reza Aslan’s religion – Islam – when talking about his new book about Jesus, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”. I think there is no room for propaganda when reviewing history. No one is objective. But we can try to be truthful.

Putting aside the thesis of his book i.e., that Jesus was an anti-Roman Jewish revolutionary, in all his interviews, Aslan goes out of his way to refer to Jesus’ Judea i.e., the land of the Jews, as “Palestine”. For all I care, he can call it “Nebraska”, as long as he doesn’t give the impression that this is really what it was called by the inhabitants of Judea in Jesus’ time. But Aslan wraps this “Palestine” name with a veneer of history. When challenged on his use of the name “Palestine” for ancient “Judea”, his answer is that he’s using the “Roman designation” for the area. According to Aslan, this designation was “Syria Palestine”. This is absolutely wrong. More than this, it demonstrates a certain cynicism when manipulating history for the purpose of ideology. Let’s look at this word “Palestine”. Where does it come from?

The archaeology demonstrates that when they arrived around 1200 BCE, they were – in diet, art, and habits – pretty Greek. They resembled, say, the people of Crete or Mycenae.

The Book of Exodus refers to a land corridor along the Mediterranean as “Derech Plishtim” i.e., “the highway of the Philistines” (Exodus 13:17). In this passage, the name seems to be generic. In other words, in the late Bronze Age, say, 1500 BCE, “Philistine” seems to be a generic term for Aegean people that we would call Minoans or Mycenaeans today.

So far, so good. There was an Aegean people called “Philistines” in the area of modern Israel from around 1500 BCE when they came as traders to 1200 BCE when they settled down, to the 7th century BCE when they disappeared after the Assyrian invasion of the area. During the 500 years that they were settled there, they became increasingly more “Canaanitish”. During the period of the Judges (14th to 10th century BCE), they were the arch-enemies of the Israelites.

After the Philistines disappeared from the historical stage, the name “Palestina” lingered on. Meaning, the people were gone, the name lingered. It appears in references here and there in classic Greek writings e.g., Herodotus. By the time Jesus was born, there hadn’t been any Philistines in the area for some 600 years. The name does not appear anywhere in the Gospels. And the people living in Judea at the time of Jesus – including Jesus and all his disciples – would never have referred to their country as “Palestine”. Even the Romans didn’t call the area Palestine. Remember, when they crucified him, the Romans put a plaque over Jesus’ head with the inscription – in three languages – “King of the Jews”, not the “Philistines” (Matthew 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:38; John 19:19).

Some 35 years after the crucifixion, some 4 years after the stoning of Jesus’ brother James, the area of Judea erupted in a massive Jewish revolt against Rome. The country fought between 66 and 70 CE. In August of 70 Jerusalem, the capital of Judea, was destroyed. The Temple of God which had lasted for some 1,000 years in two incarnations, was now in ruins – a smouldering heap. This was the Temple that Jesus wept over when he imagined its destruction (Luke 19:41). Judea fought for another 3 years at the rock fortress of Masada by the Dead Sea. Then, in 73, as the Romans were about to conquer the fortress, rather than become Roman slaves, the last Jewish defenders took their own lives and the lives of their women and children.

At this point, the Romans felt that there was no one left in Judea that could rise in revolution. They were wrong. From 115 – 117 CE, the Jews – primarily outside Judea – fought a bitter war with the Romans. The main centers of revolution were Alexandria in Egypt, Cyrene in modern day Libya, and Cyprus. The Jewish revolt basically saved the Parthian Empire from a Roman onslaught. After they licked their wounds, in 132 CE the Jews of Judea once again rose in revolution – this time under a leader called “Bar Kochba” i.e., “the son of the star”. When the Bar Kochba revolt was finally put down in 135 CE, the Romans exiled the majority of the Jewish people and renamed Judea “Palestina”. To be clear, “Syria Palestine” officially became a Roman province about a century after Jesus’ crucifixion.

It was a last humiliation. To also be clear, there were no Philistines at the time and even if some had miraculously survived, they were not Arabs but Greeks.

The area of Palestine never became an independent state. In the 7th century, Muslim armies conquered it, precipitating battles with Christian crusaders for the “Holy Land”. These bloody battles are now remembered as the “Crusades”. At the end of World War 1, the province of Palestine passed from the Ottoman Turks to the British. In 1922, the British gifted a chunk of Palestine to the Hashemite clan from Saudi Arabia. In 1946, 80% of British mandate Palestine – the area east of the Jordan River – became the modern Arab Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. One year later, 20% of British controlled Palestine became what is today the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

But to return to Aslan, it’s bit of a name game, isn’t it? If the British had called the area east of the Jordan River “Palestine” instead of “Transjordan” i.e., “over the Jordan”, no one today could say there is no Palestinian state. If you write a book about Jesus and you call his country by the name that he called it i.e., “Judea”, the politically correct armies of anti-Israel activists may get upset with you. So Aslan calls ancient Judea “Palestine” and hides behind the reference to the “Roman designation” for the province. This is very cynical. It’s very cynical to fudge the history of the Aegean Philistines 3200 years ago, lingering references to their name, and the Roman province of the second century CE. It’s very cynical to retroactively place modern Arab Palestinians into Jesus’ Jewish Hellenistic world.

But let’s say the Romans had called “Judea” “Palestine” in Jesus’ time – which they didn’t – why would a writer focusing on Jesus as a Jewish patriot i.e., a Zealot, want to call Jesus’ country by the name that his enemies used? It’s as if I wrote a book about a native American hero and kept referring to him as an “Indian”, because that’s what white people called him.

Professor Aslan, you are right to decry the use of propaganda against you. But, as they say; do unto others what you would want them to do unto you. In Jesus’ day, his country was called Judea, and the overall designation for the land was “Israel” – as it is today. You can argue about politics, but let’s not change history to suit our views.

ORIGINS OF THE NAME "PALESTINE"
From Jewish Vrtual Library

Though the definite origins of the word "Palestine" have been debated for years and are still not known for sure, the name is believed to be derived from the Egyptian and Hebrew word peleshet. Roughly translated to mean "rolling" or "migratory," the term was used to describe the inhabitants of the land to the northeast of Egypt - the Philistines. The Philistines were an Aegean people - more closely related to the Greeks and with no connection ethnically, linguistically or historically with Arabia - who conquered in the 12th Century BCE the Mediterranean coastal plain that is now Israel and Gaza.

A derivative of the name "Palestine" first appears in Greek literature in the 5th Century BCE when the historian Herodotus called the area "Palaistinē" (Greek - Παλαιστίνη). In the 2nd century CE, the Romans crushed the revolt of Shimon Bar Kokhba (132 CE), during which Jerusalem and Judea were regained and the area of Judea was renamed Palaestina in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel.

Under the Ottoman Empire (1517-1917), the term Palestine was used as a general term to describe the land south of Syria; it was not an official designation. In fact, many Ottomans and Arabs who lived in Palestine during this time period referred to the area as "Southern Syria" and not as "Palestine."

After World War I, the name "Palestine" was applied to the territory that was placed under British Mandate; this area included not only present-day Israel but also present-day Jordan.

Leading up to Israel's independence in 1948, it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate as Palestinians. It was not until years after Israeli independence that the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were called Palestinians. In fact, Arabs cannot even correctly pronounce the word Palestine in their native tongue, referring to area rather as“Filastin.”

The word Palestine or Filastin does not appear in the Koran. The term peleshet appears in the Jewish Tanakh no fewer than 250 times.

PRE-STATE ISRAEL: JEWISH CLAIM TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL
From Jewish Virtual Library, Mitchell Bard

A common misperception is that the Jews were forced into the diaspora by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. and then, 1,800 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back. In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years. A national language and a distinct civilization have been maintained.

The Jewish people base their claim to the land of Israel on at least four premises:

1) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham;

2) the Jewish people settled and developed the land;

3) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people and

4) the territory was captured in defensive wars.

The term "Palestine" is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word "Filastin" is derived from this Latin name.

The Twelve Tribes of Israel formed the first constitutional monarchy in Palestine about 1000 B.C. The second king, David, first made Jerusalem the nation's capital. Although eventually Palestine was split into two separate kingdoms, (See Lost Tribe of Israel)

Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.

Many Jews were massacred by the Crusaders during the 12th century (see The Bloody Crusades), but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement-more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel.

When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not." In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called "the holy land" (al-Arad al-Muqaddash).

Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:

We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.

In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."

The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria" and that, "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."

Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's capture of the West Bank.

Israel's international "birth certificate" was validated by the promise of the Bible; uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of Israel by most other states; and, most of all, the society created by Israel's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence.

HISTORICAL POLITICAL ENTITIES
From: Wikipedia

Philistia, a name used in the Bible to refer to a pentapolis in the Southern Levant, established by Philistines c.1175 BC and existing in various forms until the Assyrian conquest in 8th century

Paralia (Palestine), the coastal eparchy of Palestine during Hellenistic and Roman times.

Syria Palaestina or Roman Palestine, a Roman province (135-390 CE) (135-330 CE), a province of the Roman Empire following merger of renamed Iudaea with Roman Syria

Palaistinê or Palaestina names used by Greek and Romans to refer to parts of the Levant during the Persian and Hellenic periods

Byzantine Palestine

Palaestina Prima, a Byzantine province in the Levant from 390 to 636, comprising the Galilee and northern Jordan Valley

Palaestina Secunda, a Byzantine province in the Levant from 390 to 636, comprising the shoreline and hills of the Southern Levant (Judea and Samaria)

Palaestina Salutaris, a Byzantine province established in 6th century, covering the Negev and Transjordan

Jund Filastin (638 – 10th century), was one of the military districts of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate province of Bilad al-Sham (Syria)

Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem (1872-1917), also known as the "Sanjak of Jerusalem", an Ottoman district commonly referred to as "Southern Syria" or "Palestine". The district encompassed Jerusalem, Gaza, Jaffa, Hebron, Bethlehem and Beersheba.

Mandatory Palestine (1920–1948), a geopolitical entity under British administration

Ottoman Syria, divisions of the Ottoman Empire within the Levant

THE ARAB WORLD AND INDIGENOUS REVERSAL
The Times of Israel, Daniel Swindell, Mach 20, 2018

I
SUMMARY: (GO TO LINK FOR FULL ARTICLE)

The President of the Palestinian Authority claims that the nation of Palestine stretches back in history 7,000 years ago.
Pastor Raheb claims that Palestine has existed for twenty five hundred years.
In 1919, the official representatives of the Arabs living under the British Mandate claimed that Palestine did not exist and that the land belonged to Syria.
In 1920, the Arabs claimed that the land belonged to an Arab state connected to Mecca.
In 1937, the Arabs claimed that Palestine was invented by the Zionists, because the land had always belonged to Syria.
In 1964, the Arabs claimed that Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem did not belong to the nation of Palestine.
In 1968, the Arabs claimed that the land of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem did belong to the nation of Palestine.

In addition, Muslims rulers controlled Jerusalem for roughly 1,400 years, but they never declared Jerusalem to be the capital of any Muslim state. Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. The Jewish people regained their ancestral capital in The 1967 War and in response, Arab-Muslim leaders attempted to declare Jerusalem the capital of Palestine.

Today, the Arabs claim that the Palestinians are the original indigenous people, that Jerusalem is their ancient sacred capital, and that the Jews are European settler colonists.

Clearly, the historical claim changes based entirely on how it can be used as a tactic to deny Jewish people any ownership of the land.

The contention that the there was a nation of the Palestinians who preserved a distinct ethnic identity longer than the Jewish people, and who remained intact throughout the Assyrian, Babylonia, Greek, Roman, Arab, and Ottoman conquests, is pure fiction. There is no truth to this claim. The Bible mentions seven nations the Israelites encountered when they entered the land under Joshua’s leadership, but it does not mention the Palestinians. No archaeological coin, engraving, emblem, or jewelry mentions the Palestinians. Alexander the Great did not encounter them on his travels. No Roman source mentions them. Ironically, the Quran mentions the unique Jewish relationship to the land (Sura 5:21, Sura 26:59, Sura 17:104), but there is no reference to a Palestinian people dwelling in a land called Filastin during any period of Islamic history. No Ottoman source mentions them. There are no ‘Palestinian’ religious myths attached to the land. There is no such thing as a Palestinian language. There is no evidence one would expect that could prove the presence of an indigenous Palestinian people.

They do not appear in any source until after the advent of Zionism. They did not claim to have any national borders until about the time of the hippie movement, which means that Palestinian national identity is about as old as a Jimi Hendrix record. In other words, the claim that Palestinians are indigenous to Israel is simply false. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists have created some amazing disinformation. These propagandists have transformed a geographic term created by the Romans – Palaestina, which described a regional area that was never a nation – into the ‘ancient nation of Palestine.’ These activists use the appellation, Palaestina, which is found in ancient Roman texts. However, the term does not correspond in any way to the quite recent conceptualization of an Arab Palestine, which also transformed the Arab refugees of The 1948 War into an indigenous ethnic people – Palestinians purported to have existed for thousands of years. In truth, although empires came and went in the Levant, only the Jewish people, in and from the ancient land of Israel, have preserved their ethnic identity. Only the Jewish people have survived the test of time to be granted indigenous rights to the land.

In actual fact, Palestinians are chiefly descendants of Arab Muslim colonists, in the same way that white Americans are the descendants of European colonists. Additionally, the Palestinian assertion that they are comparable to Native Americans is about as historically accurate as Walt Disney’s “Pocahontas.” In contrast, Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel in the same way that Native Americans are indigenous to the land of America. This form of propaganda, in which the ancient indigenous Jewish people are reversed with the descendants of Arab colonists, should be considered indigenous reversal.

The recreation of Israel is similar to this scenario: a Native American people is given an independent state in some section of North American soil; for example, a territory the size of New Jersey is returned to the indigenous people of that area as their nation state. But, in this scenario, instead of celebrating the restoration of an indigenous people to their own piece of land, the Euro-American people claimed all Native American land for themselves, and spent endless years attempting to delegitimize and destroy the tiny Native American State. In truth, the modern recreation of Israel is not a form of colonialism. Rather, it is the defeat of over a thousand years of Arab-Islamic colonialism, and the reclamation by an indigenous people of their historical nation state, Israel.

THE CLAIM THAT “PALESTINIANS”
ARE THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF ISRAEL
The Jerusalem Post, Daniel Grynglas, 5 December, 2015

The wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were fought for many years on the battlefield between armies. In recent decades the arena of conflict has shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a war of narratives.

Everybody agrees that the current affluence of Israel, its modern infrastructure and economy were developed by the Jews. The Palestinian Arab narrative is that as the ancient, indigenous people of Palestine they feel dispossessed and they deserve to take over Israel’s riches. Jewish claims to their heritage in the land of Israel are supported by abundant archaeological artifacts and historical records.

Meanwhile, there are no records to support the Palestinian narrative. In history, art and literature there is no trace at all of any Muslim people referred to by anybody as “Palestinians.”

Records show that it was 19th and 20th century Jewish settlement and the resulting employment opportunities that drew successive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine. “The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home..” (The Peel Commission Report - 1937)

“..in the Jewish settlement Rishon l’Tsion founded in 1882, by the year 1889, the forty Jewish families settled there, had attracted more than four hundred Arab families.... Many other Arab villages had sprouted in the same fashion.” (Joan Peters - From Time Immemorial p. 252 - referenced further as: FTI)

British PM Winston Churchill said in 1939: “.. far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine]..”

Before the Six Day War in 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled in Gaza, there was never any suggestion on the part of the "Palestinians" that they wanted independence in their ancestral homeland. The reason was that the "Palestinian" nation hadn't been invented yet.

In fact, before the State of Israel was born, the term "Palestinians" was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. “The Palestine Post”, the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises.

We first hear of Arabs referred to as "Palestinians" when Egypt’s President Nasser, with help from the Russian KGB, established the "Palestine Liberation Organization" in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted “Palestinians” began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation.

Joan Peter’s research has exposed the truth about Arab claims

Many individual authors have challenged the “Palestinian” narrative. Among these, one of the most ambitious was Joan Peters, who in 1984 published her thoroughly researched study of Arab immigration into Palestine, From Time Immemorial (FTI). Peters assembled many accounts of 19th century travelers’ journeys through the Holy Land that paint the picture of a forsaken and almost uninhabited land.

Mark Twain’s comments in 1867 are probably the best known: “….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere.”

Peters documents how the current land of Israel with its millions of Arabs and Jews gradually emerged from its desolate 19th century beginnings. She analyzes the respective populations of Muslims, Christians and Jews based on data available from existing sources including Ottoman census figures, government documents, old publications, scientific research, etc.

Peters’ work was received with accolades and praise in most quarters and with predictable outrage by the supporters of the “Palestinian” narrative The vehemence with which Peters was attacked was very telling. She had undermined the basis for the delegitimization of Israel. She had shown that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are not indigenous to Palestine but rather descendants of the Arab economic migrants who arrived in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Peter’s thorough analysis consists of 410 pages of text and 190 pages of documentary appendices. The general public could hardly be expected to wade through the 600-page tome full of data tables and quotes from hundreds of sources. Thus the book was unable to reverse the continuing fiction of the indigenous “Palestinian” people whose lands have been stolen by the Jews.

A SIMPLE NEW WAY TO PROVE PETERS’ KEY CONCLUSION

In the midst of various arguments, what has been overlooked is a simple and incontrovertible way to prove that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are the descendants of the relatively recent Arab immigrants.

Peters calculated that in 1882, just the non-nomadic, settled Muslims in Palestine numbered 141,000. Among them, those that resided in Palestine before the 1831 Egyptian invasion numbered 75 percent, or 105,700 (FTI page 197). By 2015, descendants of these 105,700 persons can trace their linage in Palestine for almost 200 years. Therefore, one might consider them to be the indigenous residents. The date 1831 is important, because this was the beginning of the war with Arab Egypt, during which many thousands of Arabs settled in Palestine and changed its demographics.

The number of 105,700 settled Muslims is in general agreement with other important data. Walter Lowdermilk gives the total number of 200,000 people residing in Palestine in 1850 (page 76 – Palestine Land of Promise 1944). Lowdermilk's number includes Jews, Christians, travelling nomadic Bedouins and settled Muslims. It also includes Arabs that immigrated after the war of 1831. Arthur Ruppin estimates the total population in year 1882 as 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including nomadic and settled Muslims, Christians and Jews (The Jews in the Modern World, MacMillan - 1934 page 368).

If these 105,700 indigenous Muslims were to increase in numbers only through natural population growth, how many would they number today in 2015? This would represent the size of this population as if there were no Muslim immigration at all.

We can calculate the estimated 2015 native population, based on natural rates of population growth. I assume that the post-1882 Muslim population in Palestine -- apart from immigration — grew at approximately the same rate as the populations of neighboring Syria, Egypt and Lebanon for which rates we have reliable data. That rate of growth was 1.1% per annum. (FTI page 529 table in note 78) **

I used the compounded interest formula to do the math. Applying the 1.1% growth rate to the Muslim population resident in Palestine in 1882 yields a total number of 453,000 Muslim descendants in 2015 of these original 105,700 native people.

According to the 2015 World Almanac, the current “Palestinian” population, including Israeli Arabs, and Arab residents of Gaza, Golan, Judea and Samaria totals 10,523,715 people. 453,000 descendants of indigenous Muslim residents constitute only 4.3% of the current “Palestinian” population. Therefore the other 95.7% of present-day “Palestinians” are clearly those Arabs and their descendants who migrated to Israel between 1831 and 2015.

Despite the substantial documentation assembled by Peters, demonstrating massive Arab immigration into Palestine, anti-Israel propagandists continue to deny it. Based on what we know today, and the simple truths of basic math, the issue has become clear and unambiguous. All historic records indicate that only insignificant number of long-term settled Muslims were present in Palestine before 1882, when the large Jewish immigration began. Muslim Arab numbers increased dramatically as Jewish settlements developed infrastructure and provided work opportunities to Arabs from the neighboring countries.

Also worth noting is that the “indigenous” 4.3% comprised many non-Arab nationalities. All of them were swamped by the Arab immigrants and within a few generations largely lost their identity.

Given the complete absence of any historical record to the contrary, we can authoritatively say that the “Palestinian people” never existed until they were invented in the 1960s as a tool for continuing the Arab war against Israel.

The claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel and that most of the present Palestinian Arabs have lived in these lands since time immemorial is a total fraud. Albeit posthumously, Joan Peters has had the last word on the subject.

Daniel Grynglas San Jose, 24 April 2015

** NOTE: Peters rejects birth rates for Palestinian Muslims given by the British Mandatory Government which purposely inflated the Muslim rates to justify British inaction in face of the massive illegal Arab immigration. To disguise that illegal immigration, British claimed that Arabs in Palestine had unbelievably high birth rates.

I want to express deep gratitude to Mr. Sam Hilt for thoroughly editing and improving the above text.

Zionist invasion." The Charter also states that "Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."[84][85

TO EUROPEAN LEADERS: JEWISH FLESH IS CHEAP
Gatestone institute, Guy Millière, August 30, 2019
Palestine: NaME AND pEOPLE

(Editors Note: - from CNN - also click on link to see Timetable)

Oslo I is formally known as the Declaration of Principles (DOP). The pact established a timetable for the Middle East peace process. It planned for an interim Palestinian government in Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank.

After the signing, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hands.

The United States was not actively involved in the negotiations.

The meetings were carried out in secret over several months in 1992 and 1993.

Oslo II, officially called the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza, expanded on Oslo I. It included provisions for the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from six West Bank cities and about 450 towns. Additionally, the pact set a timetable for elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council.)

Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49, many of whom remained in refugee camps, were defined as the "Palestinian people"; in this way were the Palestinian people invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people..."

The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to "armed struggle", the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To "frustrate all the schemes of Zionism", they invented the Palestinian people; their "struggle for national liberation" gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews "armed struggle", they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.

"If you look at history... what ends conflicts is one side giving up.... and then it's over.... in World War II, [the Germans] were forced to give up... and note how much they benefited by giving up." -- Daniel Pipes, historian, November 19, 2017.

No U.S. president had ever told Palestinian leaders that they were lying, or had required them to stop inciting murder and financing terrorism, and no U.S. president had ever decided to cut funding for the Palestinian Authority as long as it continued to incentivize terrorism. President Donald J. Trump did.

French President Emmanuel Macron accepted using taxpayer money to reward murdering Jews. Macron also still accepts the United Nations' (UNRWA's) unique definition of Palestinian "refugees": that they must include endless generations of descendants.

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace"... It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it. Pictured: From left to right, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo I Accord at the White House in Washington, DC, on September 13, 1993. (Vince Musi/The White House/Wikimedia Commons)

August 7th. Israel. When Dvir Sorek, an 18-year-old student returned from Jerusalem to his school after having bought some books for his rabbis as an end-of-year gift, he was stabbed to death by two Arab terrorists.

As his funeral took place, while his father was delivering the eulogy, the inhabitants of the Arab village of Silwad, two miles North, to celebrate the murder, were setting off fireworks.

Sorek was apparently a peaceful teenager who had never hurt anyone. Among the books he brought was one by an Israeli left-wing writer, David Grossman, supporting the need to create a Palestinian state.

Sorek's "fault" was to be a Jew.

His name extends the long list of Jews killed or wounded by Arab terrorists. Some murders are even more cruel. The man who raped and murdered Ori Ansbacher in February in Jerusalem said, "I wanted to kill a Jew and be a martyr." In 2011, five members of the Fogel family, including three young children, were slaughtered. In 2014, two murderers with axes, knives and a gun entered a synagogue in Jerusalem during morning prayers and massacred five worshipers and a policeman who tried to stop the attackers. On December 13, 2018, at a bus stop near Ofra, two young Jews were shot dead by terrorists. Four days before that, another gun attack injured seven Jews. A wounded young woman survived, but despite the efforts of doctors, the baby she was carrying died. Last week, in a terrorist bombing on a hiking trail near Dolev, north of Jerusalem, a teenage Jewish girl was murdered. Her father and brother were seriously wounded.

After each murder, celebrations like those in Silwad take place. Candies and sweets are passed out in the street. If the murderers are shot by the Israeli soldiers or the police, they are proclaimed martyrs, and are celebrated. Their portraits are displayed in Palestinian towns. Whether the terrorist murders are killed or whether they are arrested, tried and imprisoned in Israel, they or their families are awarded a generous monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority -- an amount higher than the average Palestinian wage. Sometimes, the mothers of the murderers say how proud they are of the act their sons committed.

The depravity built-in to murdering civilians, the celebrations that follow, the prestige granted to racist murderers, the alluring payments granted as a reward, and the pride of the mothers all stem from an incitement (promoying violence and terror) to hate Jews that is injected into the minds of the Palestinian Arabs by the people and institutions that lead them.

Textbooks used in Palestinian schools are filled with calls to murder Jews, even if the topic is math. Newspapers of the Palestinian Authority regularly publish anti-Semitic cartoons worthy of those published by Nazi Germany's Der Stürmer. The UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination devoted an entire day, August 13, 2019, to studying the anti-Semitic propaganda broadcast by the Palestinian Authority's media. The data gathered was overwhelming. The legal adviser of UN Watch, Dina Rovner, showed the committee how the Palestinian Authority's media "perpetuates antisemitic stereotypes such as that Jews are greedy, that they are part of a conspiracy to control the world, that they are baby killers, and that they poison Palestinians and steal their organs".

Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority is still fundamentally a terrorist organization dedicated to destroying Israel and Israeli Jews by all means.

Until they issued the Venice Declaration in 1980, the nine member states of the European Community saw the PLO as a terrorist group, and for good reasons: in December 1973, a Palestinian attack at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport resulted in the deaths of 34 people, and two Palestinian attacks also took place at Orly Airport in Paris, one in January 1975, another in May 1978. The US and Israel, until 1991, defined the PLO as a criminal terrorist organization, and contacts between Israelis and PLO leaders were prohibited by Israeli law.

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace". The Palestinian Authority was created a few months later and became the new name of the PLO.

It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.

The leaders of the Western world pretended that it did not matter, and looked the other way. They insisted that the Israeli leaders negotiate, as if there were no terrorism and as if ncitement to murder did not exist.

So, Israeli leaders negotiated. The negotiations failed.

Since 2008, the Palestinian Authority has stopped negotiating with Israel, thereby nullifying its commitments in the Oslo Accords. Instead, the Palestinian Authority is conducting an international diplomatic offensive. According to the Palestinian Authority, the non-existent "State of Palestine" is now recognized by 139 countries, including several member states of the European Union and the Holy See. The State of Palestine was granted non-member state observer status at the United Nations in 2012 and the opportunity to join various UN agencies. In 2018, the Group of 77, the largest intergovernmental organization of developing countries in the UN, chose as its leader the "State of Palestine".

As leaders of the Palestinian Authority see that the fantasy among most of the leaders of the Western world is still strong, they no longer even hide their refusal to renounce terrorism. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, now approaching the 14th year of his four-year term, proudly announced that he will continue to reward the murderers of Jews and the murderers' families. Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, recently said:

"Palestinian society holds a completely different attitude toward those whom Israel calls 'terrorists.' These militants are, instead, regarded by us as people who sacrifice themselves for the liberation of the Palestinian people".

Palestinian leaders, without anyone ever blaming them, also deny Israel's right to exist. On August 14, Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority's Ambassador to the UN, said. "What we face is the Zionist movement, I would like to remind you that in 1975, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, indicating that Zionism is a form of racism". He left out that the resolution had been revoked in 1991 and that the Zionist movement reached its goal: Israel does exist. Khraishi spoke as if the state of Israel still did not. His defamation and attempted erasure of Israel were not even mentioned in the Western media.

Hamas, a more violent and radical organization than the Palestinian Authority, is often used as an example to try to float the idea that the Palestinian Authority is, by contrast, "moderate". Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim said in 2014 that Hamas has "chosen fast jihad". However, just because the Palestinian Authority proceeds more slowly, does not make it fundamentally different.

The Muslim world in general has never accepted the existence of Israel. On the day the birth of Israel was proclaimed, May 14, 1948, the armies of five Arab countries invaded Israel to destroy the newborn State. Israel survived. Another war to destroy Israel took place in June 1967, then another in 1973. Each time, Israel won.

In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a "war for the destruction of Israel". Instead, they would call it a "war of national liberation". From then on, the PLO was presented as a "liberation movement". Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49 and remained in refugee camps were defined as the "Palestinian people", and so the Palestinian people were invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism."

A political program, adopted in Cairo, Egypt, at the Palestinian National Council on June 9, 1974, spoke of the need to create a "Palestinian national authority". The program defined this creation as a "first step", a basis for moving towards "the liberation of all Palestinian territory". Twenty years later, the Palestinian Authority was created. The goal nevertheless remains the "liberation of the entire Palestinian territory", meaning all of Israel.

The program also mentioned the need to "resort to all means necessary" and insisted on the importance of "armed struggle". It talked about a strategy of "frustration of all the schemes of Zionism". The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to "armed struggle", the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To "frustrate all the schemes of Zionism", they invented the Palestinian people; their "struggle for national liberation" gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews as "armed struggle", they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.

The journalist Amotz Asa-El and the historian Moshe Dann recently wrote about the multifaceted war led by the Palestinians in the context of a "war of attrition".

"Wars of attrition," Asa-El notes, "are not decided by their parties' balance of troops, arms or resources, but by their balance of spirit. The winner will not be the one left with more land, population or treasure, but the one whose spirit will last longer".

Dann writes:

"From a Palestinian perspective, their war of attrition has been successful. Despite engaging in

incitement and terrorism, they are recognized and supported by the international community, including their demand for statehood... it encourages the belief that they can win if they are committed and determined."

The possibility for Israel of turning the tide and prevailing has been defined by Daniel Pipes:

"If you look at history (and I'm a historian), what ends conflicts is one side giving up. Now, think about it; if you and I are in a struggle, it's only going to end when one of us gives up, and then it's over. Until one of us gives up, the conflict can resume. The Koreas could be at war today, for all we know, because neither side has given up. World War I, the Germans lost, but didn't give up, so they gave it another try, and in World War II, they were forced to give up, and they did; and note how much they benefited by giving up." [Emphasis added.]

In other words, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end only when Palestinians realize they cannot achieve their goal of eliminating the Jewish state of Israel.

For now, Palestinians, with the help of the Iranians and the Europeans, continue to think that they will be able to eliminate Israel.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump is the first world leader to see that Palestinians must understand that they will not win and eliminate Israel.

No world leader had ever before questioned the unique definition of Palestinian "refugees" given by the United Nations (UNRWA): that they must include endless generations of descendants. No world leader had dared to say that there are not five or six million refugees, but only a few tens of thousands, and that the flooding of Israel by people incited to murder Jews would not take place. No world leader had officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or relocated an embassy in Jerusalem. President Trump did.

President Trump is also the first U.S. president since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 never to have affirmed the need for a "Palestinian state".

Alas, the attitude of other Western political leaders, particularly in Europe, is quite different.

French President Emmanuel Macron promised to give the Palestinian Authority the funding that the United States no longer granted him, and that he would not renounce rewarding Jew-killers and their families. Macron accepted using the money of French taxpayers to reward murdering Jews. Macron also still accepts UNRWA's definition -- just for Palestinians -- of being refugees in perpetuity, through the generations. He called President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel a "serious mistake", and stressed several times the urgent "need for a Palestinian State".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted the same positions. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said in April:

"... the European Union voice, and I can probably say the European voice, has been very loud, clear and consistent all over these years on our constant work for the implementation of the Oslo agreements, and the creation of a Palestinian state... the European Union is and will remain the biggest and the most reliable donor to the Palestinians..."

She did not utter a word of condemnation regarding the Palestinian Arabs' use of terrorism or murdering Jews.

In 2016, Mahmoud Abbas delivered a speech in the European Parliament in which he falsely claimed that "Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed." He received a standing ovation. No European leader took him to task for him for his lies.

Macron, Merkel and the European Union show Palestinian leaders that as long as the Western world is divided, they can continue to incite and murder.

In the European media, the murders of Jews, such as that of Dvir Sorek, are hardly ever mentioned. When murderers, such as those who killed Sorek, are eliminated by the Israeli army or the police, it is the Israelis who are depicted as having "killed a Palestinian" and as the real murderers.

As a character said in the movie Exodus, "Jewish flesh is cheap". Jewish flesh was already cheap in Europe 90 years ago. In the eyes of Macron, Merkel, Mogherini and many European journalists, it still is.

The European Union is considering a regulation -- it does not yet exist -- requiring labels to be placed on products made by Jews in Judea and Samaria, to caution buyers that the product was made in a "settlement colony." The shape of the labels that would be used has not yet been defined. Maybe a European will suggest a yellow star?

LINKS

Wikipedia Syria Palaestina

Wikipedia Timeline of the name "Palestine"

Jewish Encyclopedia Philistines

Ancient History Encyclopedia Palestine

Moment How Philistine Became a Dirty Word

Zola Levitt Ministries Palestine vs. Israel as the Name of the Holy Land

Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948 by Moshe Aumann

Palestinian history fabricated PMW - Palestine Media Watch 2019

PALESTINE:
A COUNTRIES AND A PEOPLES NAME

WHAT IS PALESTINE?
WHO ARE THE PALESTINIANS?
CHANGELING9AU 2013 (15.12)

DEBUNKING THE PALESTINE LIE
Encounter Books 2011 (11.36)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has launched an international campaign to achieve recognition by the United Nations for an independent Palestinian state. Abbas and his international supporters claim that only Israel (with the United States) stands in the way of this act of historical justice, which would finally bring about peace in the Middle East.

This video argues against this.

PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
AND THE
THE EXPULSION OF JEWS FROM
ARAB AND MUSLIM COUNTRIES
Israel's Foreign Affairs Min. 2017 (3.01)

On June 20th, the world marks 'World Refugee Day', commemorating the strength, courage and perseverance of of refugees. On this day, we remember the 20th-century expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. Jewish communities in Arab countries formed a significant part of the Jewish diaspora. From 1920 onward, some 850,000 Jews were expelled from their homes – from Tripoi to Cairo, from Damascus to Baghdad.

Palestine:
History of a Name

Origins
of the Name ‘Palestine’

Pre-State Israel.
Jewish Claim
to the
Land of Israel

Historical
Political Entities

The Arab World
and
Indigenous Reversal

The Claim that “Palestinians”
are the
Indigenous People of Israel

To European Leaders: Jewish Flesh Is Cheap

Links