Posted on 07/13/2002 3:04:17 PM PDT by Kaafi
A provocative headline? It's more than that. It's the truth.
Truth does not change. Truth is truth. If something was true 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, it is still true today.
And the truth is that only 30 years ago, there was very little confusion on this issue of Palestine.
You might remember the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir making the bold political statement: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people."
The statement has been a source of ridicule and derision by Arab propagandists ever since. They love to talk about Golda Meir's "racism." They love to suggest she was in historical denial. They love to say her statement is patently false – an intentional lie, a strategic deception.
What they don't like to talk about, however, are the very similar statements made by Yasser Arafat and his inner circle of political leadership years after Meir had told the truth – that there is no distinct Palestinian cultural or national identity.
So, despite the fact that conventional wisdom has now proclaimed that there is such a thing as the Palestinian people, I'm going to raise those uncomfortable quotations made by Arafat and his henchmen when their public-relations guard was down.
Way back on March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:
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.
For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.
That's pretty clear, isn't it? It's even more specific than Golda Meir's statement. It reaffirms what I have written on this subject. And it is hardly the only such statement of its kind. Arafat himself made a very definitive and unequivocal statement along these lines as late as 1993. It demonstrates conclusively that the Palestinian nationhood argument is the real strategic deception – one geared to set up the destruction of Israel.
In fact, on the same day Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993, he explained his actions on Jordan TV. Here's what he said: "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."
No matter how many people convince themselves that the aspirations for Palestinian statehood are genuine and the key to peace in the Middle East, they are still deceiving themselves.
I've said it before and I will say it again, in the history of the world, Palestine has never existed as a nation. The region known as Palestine was ruled alternately by Rome, by Islamic and Christian crusaders, by the Ottoman Empire and, briefly, by the British after World War I. The British agreed to restore at least part of the land to the Jewish people as their ancestral homeland. It was never ruled by Arabs as a separate nation.
Why now has it become such a critical priority?
The answer is because of a massive deception campaign and relentless terrorism over 40 years.
Golda Meir was right. Her statement is validated by the truth of history and by the candid, but not widely circulated, pronouncements of Arafat and his lieutenants.
Israel and the West must not surrender to terrorism by granting the killers just what they want – a public relations triumph and a strategic victory. It's not too late to say no to terrorism. It's not too late to say no to another Arab terror state. It's not too late to tell the truth about Palestine.
Damn.... I thought Israel finally took care of business :-)
There is no distinct Palestinian culture, no Palestinian language, nothing to differentiate "Palestinians" from any Arab people. Not only is Arafat and Egytpian, most "Palestinians" are in fact Jordanian. Palestine has never been the name for any nation; it is a geographical term. And if that isn't bad enough, the original "Philistines" weren't Arabs, either. They were from the Greek Islands and other areas close to the Aegean Sea.
That won't keep the liberals from insisting on the reality of "Palestine," though. They're far too brilliant and intellectual for facts or logic.
Source? and search.
You only make that statement because you don't wish for them to exist.
The fact that they don't have a state doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Perhaps you should ask the Jews who have been murdered if they exist.
Ethnocentricity is a state of mind. You need to ask the Palestinian people if they exist. You'll get the true answer there.
I'd guess that by now everybody understands that there really are Palestinians. Maybe they were there all along, or maybe they came into existence last week, but it is undeniable that they exist today - particularly the overwhelming majority of them who were born there - that's the American standard - "born there".
You'll have to speak to us in our own language, eh!
BS to the nth degree. The so-called Palis came out of Jordan (Transjordan). This is well documented. In fact, Arafat himself isn't a "Palestinian." He's from EGYPT! The creation of the "Palestinian" people was and is a propaganda tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I made similar statements on another website and was just vilified.
It is amazing to me how the world continues on wearing blinders............
You just don't get it, sir. These people have decided they are a people, and that's all that's necessary for them to go out and start bombing people.
For you to deny their ethnicity is just completely out of touch with reality.
The past has nothing to do with it... it is the present that matters, as another earlier poster pointed out.
Not so.
They are denying their own ethnicity by referring to themselves as "Palestinians." Their "ethnicity" is Arab while their true "nationality" is Jordanian.
When I look at them, the propaganda they are force fed, and how they teach their children (for an example click here), I cannot help but be overcome with sadness. It's not sadness due to the atrocities that they say them "must" commit. When I look at them, I can't help but see American blacks like where I'm from. THAT'S what saddens and angers me to no end.
In other words, they are being used just like American black people are.
How's this for reality: The so-called "Palestinians" are as "Palestinian" as I am "African." That dog simply doesn't hunt.
Many African nations only emerged in the last 40 years.
East Timor only became a nation last year.
A nationality emerges when enough people form a conciousness of common nationality.
The Palestinians obviously qualify now. If they cannot be a nation because they have no distinctive characteristics when compared to the other Arab nations, then none of the other Arab nations can qualify either, by exactly the same line of "reason."
I am not a fan of the Palestinian's actions, but this line of reasoning by their opponents, IMHO, is remarkably silly.
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