Posted on 02/19/2003 2:34:09 PM PST by anotherview
opinion
Why That Texas Town is Named “Palestine”
Dr. Rafael Medoff
19 February 2003
The fact that the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in the vicinity of a Texas town named “Palestine” has been the subject of much conversation in the Middle East.
In Cairo, the New York Times reports, “the average cafe denizen” noted the presence of an Israeli astronaut on board, as well as the reports “that it apparently began crumbling over Palestine, Texas,” and concluded that Allah was punishing America for supporting Israel.
In the Gulf kingdom known as the United Arab Emirates, a newspaper columnist expressed his hope that “perhaps the sight of the Columbia shuttle´s crashing in the town of Palestine, Texas reminds the Israeli people of the daily tragedy of the Palestinians.”
And on the Islamic website alfjr.com, one Sheikh Dr. Ali al-Tamimi remarked that “when CNN announced at the beginning that the shuttle fell near the city of Palestine, Texas, I said to myself: Allah is great; thus, Allah willing, will America fall in Palestine.”
Whether the shuttle exploded precisely over the town of Palestine, or merely in its vicinity, is not clear. Be that as it may, the tragic spotlight now shining upon Palestine, Texas, naturally leaves some Americans curious as to why it has such as unusual name.
The answer is that it’s not an unusual name at all.
In Texas, there are also towns named Hebbronville and Joshua. There is a Hebron in North Dakota and a Sinai in South Dakota, a Jerusalem in Arkansas, two Shilohs in Ohio, a Jericho in Vermont, a Bethlehem as well as a Nazareth in Pennsylvania, and a Zion in Maryland. Nearly every state in the Union has one or more towns named after biblical sites or individuals. Altogether, there are more than 1,000 biblically-named towns from coast to coast.
That’s not because residents of those regions have some special sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs. Towns like “Palestine” were established by 19th-century religious Christian settlers, who chose such names to express their spiritual attachment to the land and people of the Bible. When they thought of Palestine, they recalled the Jewish kingdom of ancient times. In their prayers, they prayed for the return of the Jews to the Holy Land.
A Baptist minister named Daniel Parker brought twenty-five families from Illinois to settle in eastern Texas in the 1830s. When they formally established the town of Palestine, in 1846, they named it after Rev. Parker’s hometown of Palestine, Illinois. That name had been chosen because the beauty of that part of Illinois reminded its first settlers “of the land of milk and honey, Palestine,” according to the official account by the Crawford County (Illinois) Historical Society.
Americans were aware that Palestine had some Arab residents. Mark Twain had mentioned them in his account of his visit to the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869), as had Herman Melville in his famous Clarel: A Poem and the Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). But it was common knowledge that the Arab population of Palestine was relatively small and unsettled. H. Allen Tupper, Jr. wrote in the New York Times in 1896, after having “ridden on horseback more than four hundred miles through Palestine and Syria,” that virtually the only local people he encountered were “merchantmen with their long camel trains” and “wild Bedouin tribes” that “reside in one locality not more than two months.”
Moreover, the Arab residents of 19th-century Palestine did not consider themselves “Palestinians.” They regarded Palestine not as a separate country, but as the southern part of Syria. As the Arab scholar Zeine N. Zeine wrote in 1973: “The world in which the Arabs and Turks lived together was, before the end of the 19th century, politically a non-national world. The vast majority of the Muslim Arabs did not show any nationalist or separatist tendencies except when the Turkish leaders themselves, after 1908, asserted their own nationalism.”
If there had been a conflict between the Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine in the 1800s, the original residents of Palestine, Texas, undoubtedly would have sided with the Jews, whose claim to the land is clear from the Bible that Christians and Jews both cherish. It is for the same reason that Bible-believing Christians today – probably including more than a few residents of Palestine, Texas and Palestine, Illinois – constitute one of the major sources of pro-Israel sentiment in the United States.
Dr. Medoff is Visiting Scholar in the Jewish Studies Program at the State University of New York-Purchase College; his books include the Historical Dictionary of Zionism, coauthored with Prof. Chaim I. Waxman.
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It began crumbling over California. Maybe God was punishing Hollywood.
sheesh. I'll bet it passed over a lot of towns along the way... are they under the Judgement of Allah now too? weird.
Not either of them.
It's up to the foreigners to clear the stigma from the names.
This is Texas.
I wonder how old that joke is.
My high school football coach was from Bowlegs...and the story ranked as an old chestnut even then (1954).
Oh, and it's pronounced "AY-rab."
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