A Japanese View of the Palestinians

Someone sent this to me to have a look at. I wanted to get some opinions as to the validity of these assertions.

if they really have a genuine ethnic identity that gives them right for self-determination

Is this the basis for the right of self determination? "Genuine ethnic identity?" If so, how do Americans have a right to self determination?

The assertions are valid. Let them respond to them one at a time. Historically the area was peopled by a variety of nomadic tribes. Israel clearly has a history that goes back thousands of years in this area. The liberal News Media denies this of course. Archaelogy supports it.

It's 100% correct. The 'Palestinean people' are an invention of the PLO and cannot be distinguished in any significant way from Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.

ping....pls give your opinion.

Israel has bought into the reality of "Palestine". I feel no special need to prevent people from cutting their own throats, if they feel that this is the best way to conduct the business of their nation.

Look what happened yesterday. After that, why is Arafat and his henchmen still alive? Why are those people who call themselves Palestinian and who live to murder Israelis still allowed to remain on Israeli territory?

The people of Israel have made a rational, mature, but fatal decision to let themselves be destroyed in the name of peace. So be it.

Did you know these important facts?

• The Jewish people existed 2000 years before the establishment of Islam.

• Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital for over 3,300 years, and was never an Arab or Muslim capital.

• Jerusalem is mentioned 700 times in the Bible, while the Koran does not contain a single reference to Jerusalem.

• There has been a Jewish Majority in Jerusalem since before 1850.

• The Jewish People pray facing Jerusalem, while the Arabs pray with their backs to Jerusalem, in the direction of Mecca.

• The PLO was established in 1964 while eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) were under their control. Rather than establishing a political entity out of the this, the PLO used the territory as a base of attack with the aim of "liberating" the rest of Israel.

• The Arabs have 500 times more land mass than Israel.

• The Arabs have 21 states; The Jews have only one Homeland.

http://www.moledet.org/didyouknow.html

THERE IS A PALESTINIAN STATE – IT IS JORDAN

JORDAN IS PALESTINE
In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration calling for the creation of a Jewish Homeland in all of Mandate Palestine – the Biblical Land of Israel. This Promise was broken when the British handed the eastern bank of the Jordan River to the Hashemite of Saudi Arabia in 1922. This land was to eventually be called Jordan.

Today, Israel (including Judea, Samaria & Gaza) constitutes 24% of the area designated for the Jewish homeland. Jordan comprises 76% of Mandate Palestine – Biblical Land of Israel and has a 70% Palestinian Arab majority.

THE LATE KING HUSSEIN OF JORDAN, 1981:
"The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan."

Palestinian people do not exist.

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.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28222

The point the writer is trying to make is that there are a number of specific assertions one might make about a country which logically followed result in a belief that a country exists. Else, absent one or more of them, it does not exist.

To a degree most of this particular writer's piece comes from a barrage of anti-semitic literature written mostly in the 1800s for the purpose of discrediting Jews (a people having some claim to "nationhood" through a 1900 year period where they had no specific country.)

Antisemitic trash recycled to trash someone else is still trash.

The cold, hard facts of nationhood is that countries are formed all the time, and sometimes they are disposed of, or merged with others. Some "nations", for example the Sami, never founded a state. Even the Roma have done that from time to time, but the Sami didn't. Other nations have formed ruling governments that lasted a thousand years (I am thinking of Venice, which holds humanity's record for state duration).

If you had been a regular FreeRepublic reader you would know that this particular issue, with pretty much the same predicatory statement, has been discussed here many times. It will raise anti-Palestinian and anti-Jewish noise again, as it has in the past. By now you should recognize that it's not the sort of thing that is going to lead anybody to a peaceful settlement of the situation in the area.

Thank you so much for putting all of this information into one place!!
This weekend I was at my in-laws' cottage and walked into the middle of a conversation where my hubby's cousin was bad mouthing Israel for taking the Palistians land. I told him that there never was a country called Palistine. It was a bastardization of Philistine. Everyone told me I was nuts and to prove this point and my contention that Jordan held their homeland.
Geez, we were at a cottage!! Short of God dropping it down on me, I could not get it.

NOW, I will print this thread and send it to all of them.
God Bless You!!

You might read the other posts before you print them all out to send to your family, although I'm pretty sure they already know where you're coming from!(ROTFLMAO)

More here for reference -

The Jewish Claim To The Land Of Israel

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, Jewish independence there lasted for 212 years. This is almost as long as Americans have enjoyed independence in what has become known as the United States.

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, 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.

http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/The_Jewish_Claim_To_The_Land_Of_Israel.html

read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0963624202/qid=1061417824/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-0462146-6143115

from Amazon's first review:

"For all those who feel the arab version of events in the middle east and their obsession with hate towards the Jews is justified please read this wonderful account of the true history of the region. Peters began her work trying to find the roots of the refugee problem and instead discovered the secret history the arabs dont want you to know. Namely that 800,000 jews were forced to flee Arab countries where they had been persecuted, raped, forced to work on the sabbath and degraded in other ways. Compared to what the jews suffered under arab rule the arabs under isreali rule are kings, masters of their own destiny..."

The 'Palestinean people' are an invention of the PLO and cannot be distinguished in any significant way from Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.

Palestine was what the Romans called the area and when the British administered the area, they called it again Palestine. Before that, the region was part of Transjordan.

>>You might read the other posts before you print them all out to send to your family, although I'm pretty sure they already know where you're coming from!(ROTFLMAO)<<

LOL!
Thankfully, they are just my In-laws. My own family does not argue with me because they know I'm a FReeper.
And I have back-up. Ask Jonathansmommie, my niece.

So far, short of your post, I really don't see much to say that any of this is wrong.

Hence, the strategy of calling themselves Palis to inure to themselves some sort of historical right to the land, when in fact they are simply Arabs just like any other Arab anywhere else.

“Palestine” is not a country and never has been; “Palestinians” are not a distinct race or culture, and the “west bank” (Judea) is not their ancestral homeland. Philistia (the ancient Greek name from which Palestine is derived) was part of the Ottoman Empire until WWI, after which jurisdiction was assigned to Britain by the League of Nations. In 1917, Britain designated a portion of the land for the Jewish people, whose homeland it had been for 2000 years. Thereupon the Arabs began their original jihad, causing such turmoil that finally in 1947 the United Nations capitulated to Arab demands and asked the Jews to give the area west of the Jordan River (hence the name “west bank”) to the Arabs. The Jews agreed, declared their independence in 1948, and were invaded that same day by several Arab nations, led by the Trans-Jordanian kingdom which took over the west bank and occupied it for 19 years. Until then, the term Palestinian referred to anyone from this area – the Jews were the original Palestinians! Arabs realized the advantage of a discrete political identity and began using the term to create an image of themselves as the only rightful inhabitants.

In the defensive 1967 war, Israel recaptured the west bank, and Jews began returning to the land where they had lived for millennia (excluding the period when their homes and temples were destroyed during Jordanian occupation). The “Palestinian People” now demanding their “liberation” are really Arabs who do not fit into boundary lines created by foreign powers (for European interests) almost a century ago. This could be remedied if the “Arab brothers” gave Palestinians anything more than “refugee” status in their countries. But then those rich Arab autocracies would have no “middle east conflict” to fuel the hatred of their oppressed people – or to talk about on American television to divert attention from terrorism and other critical issues concerning Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a microcosm of the real battle: an Islamic holy war against Western political and economic freedoms. This war is backed by several Arab states whose motivation is preserving their own despotism. Palestinians are pawns in this war, religion is merely its tool, and liberation its futile rallying cry. The ”situation in the Middle East” is not a remote struggle thousands of miles away – it is America’s own fight. Israel is on the front lines of the war America has only recently been forced to join. Let us not abandon her. We’re next in line.

All of which is very good and edifying, but didn't you leave out 400 years or so of rule by the Persians (who were driven from the Scene by the Arabs after Mohammad).

Jews and Christians were dancing in the streets as Moslem armies (mostly galvanized Christians formerly in the employ of Byzantium) threw the Persians back to the precincts of Ishfahan!

Things change (although there's a bumper sticker that says it better) and one millenium's enemy can be another millenium's friend.

Then, too, thanks to Jewish missionaries, almost all of the non-Christian Arabic speaking Middle-East was, to a degree, nominally Jewish in those days, and that, by itself, gives the Arabs as good a claim to spiritual descent from Judah as anybody else.

The real issue should not be ancient rights, but to advance the cause of peace for any of the people living in the area today.

Good. Bookmarking.

It looks as though you've gotten your answers, but I'll add a couple of articles. There are a multitude of quotes from Arab leaders dating to the 60s and 70s in which they acknowledge that distinct "palestinian" arabs don't exist, rather the concept of "palestinians" was created as a way to establish an arab claim to Israel. If I have time I'll try to post some later, though there are a few quotes in the third article.

===========================

The Origins of the Palestinian Arabs
by Daniel Pipes

No "Palestinian Arab people" existed at the start of 1920, but, by December, it took shape in a form recognizably similar to today's.

Until the late nineteenth century, residents living in the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean identified themselves primarily in terms of religion: Moslems felt far stronger bonds with remote co-religionists than with nearby Christians and Jews. Living in that area did not imply any sense of common political purpose.

Then came the ideology of nationalism from Europe; its ideal of a government that embodies the spirit of its people was alien but appealing to Middle Easterners. How to apply this ideal, though? Who constitutes a nation and where must the boundaries be? These questions stimulated huge debates.

Some said the residents of the Levant are a nation; others said Eastern Arabic speakers; or all Arabic speakers; or all Moslems.

But no one suggested "Palestinians," and for good reason. Palestine, then a secular way of saying Eretz Yisra'el or Terra Sancta, embodied a purely Jewish and Christian concept, one utterly foreign to Moslems, even repugnant to them.

This distaste was confirmed in April 1920, when the British occupying force carved out a "Palestine." Moslems reacted very suspiciously, rightly seeing this designation as a victory for Zionism. Less accurately, they worried about it signaling a revival in the Crusader impulse. No prominent Moslem voices endorsed the delineation of Palestine in 1920; all protested it.

Instead, Moslems west of the Jordan directed their allegiance to Damascus, where the great-great-uncle of Jordan's King Abdullah II was then ruling; they identified themselves as Southern Syrians.

Interestingly, no one advocated this affiliation more emphatically than a young man named Amin Husseini. In July 1920, however, the French overthrew this Hashemite king, in the process killing the notion of a Southern Syria.

Isolated by the events of April and July, the Moslems of Palestine made the best of a bad situation. One prominent Jerusalemite commented, just days following the fall of the Hashemite kingdom: "after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine."

Following this advice, the leadership in December 1920 adopted the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state. Within a few years, this effort was led by Husseini.

Other identities - Syrian, Arab, and Moslem - continued to compete for decades afterward with the Palestinian one, but the latter has by now mostly swept the others aside and reigns nearly supreme.

============================

"There are no Palestinians"
Larry Miller
The Weekly Standard | April 21, 2003

A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need.

Don't thank me. I'm a giver. Here we go:

The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no "Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."

So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death."

I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this,then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters." Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel.

They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course -- that's where the real fun is -- but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it -- for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you know that's really saying something.

It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews.

Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals.

Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children? Disgusting. No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.

Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that with vital operations coming up against Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of supermodels who've just had their drugs taken away.

However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight.

We've already lost some. After September 11 our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.

If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan. (Hey, wait a minute, that's actually not such a bad idea. . . .ooh, that is, what a horrible thought, yeah, horrible. . . .)

---------------------------------

WHAT DOES "PALESTINE" MEAN?

It has never been the name of a nation or state. It is a geographical term, used to designate the region at those times in history when there is no nation or state there.

The word itself derives from "Peleshet", a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into English as "Philistine". The Philistines were mediterranean people originating from Asia Minor and Greek localities. They reached the southern coast of Israel in several waves. One group arrived in the pre-patriarchal period and settled south of Beersheba in Gerar where they came into conflict with Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. Another group, coming from Crete after being repulsed from an attempted invasion of Egypt by Rameses III in 1194 BCE, seized the southern coastal area, where they founded five settlements (Gaza, Ascalon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gat). In the Persian and Greek periods, foreign settlers - chiefly from the Mediterranean islands - overran the Philistine districts. From the time of Herodotus, Greeks called the eastern coast of the Mediterranean "Syria Palaestina".

The Philistines were not Arabs nor even Semites, they were most closely related to the Greeks. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs. The name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine" is not an Arabic name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Greco-Roman "Palastina"; which is derived from the Peleshet, (root Pelesh) which was a general term meaning "dividers", "penetrators" or "invaders". This referred to the Philistine's invasion and conquest of the coast from the sea.

The use of the term "Palestinian" for an Arab ethnic group is a modern political creation which has no basis in fact - and had never had any international or academic credibility before 1967.

HOW DID THE LAND OF ISRAEL BECOME "PALESTINE"?

In the First Century CE, the Romans crushed the independent kingdom of Judea. After the failed rebellion of Bar Kokhba in the Second Century CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe out the identity of Israel-Judah-Judea. Therefore, he took the name Palastina and imposed it on all the Land of Israel. At the same time, he changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.

The Romans killed many Jews and sold many more in slavery. Some of those who survived still alive and free left the devastated country, but there was never a complete abandonment of the Land. There was never a time when there were not Jews and Jewish communities, though the size and conditions of those communities fluctuated greatly.

THE HISTORY OF PALESTINE

Thousands of years before the Romans invented "Palastina" the land had been known as "Canaan". The Canaanites had many tiny city-states, each one at times independent and at times a vassal of an Egyptian or Hittite king. The Canaanites never united into a state. After the Exodus from Egypt probably in the Thirteenth Century BCE but perhaps earlier -- , the Children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan. There they formed first a tribal confederation, and then the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the post-biblical kingdom of Judea.

From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has the only united, independent, sovereign nation-state that ever existed in "Palestine" west of the Jordan River. (In biblical times, Ammon, Moab and Edom as well as Israel had land east of the Jordan, but they disappeared in antiquity and no other nation took their place until the British invented Trans-Jordan in the 1920s.)

After the Roman conquest of Judea, "Palastina" became a province of the pagan Roman Empire and then of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and very briefly of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. In 638 CE, an Arab-Muslim Caliph took Palastina away from the Byzantine Empire and made it part of an Arab-Muslim Empire. The Arabs, who had no name of their own for this region, adopted the Greco-Roman name Palastina, that they pronounced "Falastin".

In that period, much of the mixed population of Palastina was forced to convert to Islam and adopted the Arabic language. They were subjects of a distant Caliph who ruled them from his capital, that was first in Damascus and later in Baghdad. They did not become a nation or an independent state, or develop a distinct society or culture.

In 1099, Christian Crusaders from Europe conquered Palestina-Falastin. After 1099, it was never again under Arab rule. The Christian Crusader kingdom was politically independent, but never developed a national identity. It remained a military outpost of Christian Europe, and lasted less than 100 years. Thereafter, Palestine was joined to Syria as a subject province first of the Mameluks, ethnically mixed slave-warriors whose center was in Egypt, and then of the Ottoman Turks, whose capital was in Istanbul.

During the First World War, the British took Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its subject provinces "Palestine" was assigned to the British, to govern temporarily as a mandate from the League of Nations.

THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME

Travelers to Palestine from the Western world left records of what they saw there. The theme throughout their reports is dismal: The land was empty, neglected, abandoned, desolate, fallen into ruins.

Nothing there [Jerusalem] to be seen but a little of the old walls which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds
-- English pilgrim in 1590

The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population"
-- British consul in 1857

There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent [valley of Jezreel] -- not for 30 miles in either direction. . . . One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.

For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee . . .

Nazareth is forlorn . . . Jericho lies a moldering ruin . . . Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature . . .

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. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country . . . .

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes . . . desolate and unlovely . . .

-- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1867

The restoration of the "desolate and unlovely" land began in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century with the first Jewish pioneers. Their labors created newer and better conditions and opportunities, which in turn attracted migrants from many parts of the Middle East, both Arabs and others.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, confirmed by the League of Nations Mandate, commited the British Government to the principle that "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. . . . " It was specified both that this area be open to "close Jewish settlement" and that the rights of all inhabitants already in the country be preserved and protected.

Mandate Palestine originally included all of what is now Jordan, as well as all of what is now Israel, and the territories between them. However, when Great Britain's prot?g? Emir Abdullah was forced to leave the ancestral Hashemite domain in Arabia, the British created a realm for him that included all of Manfate Palestine east of the Jordan River. There was no traditional or historic Arab name for this land, so it was called after the river: first Trans-Jordan and later Jordan.

By this political act, that violated the conditions of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, the British cut more than 75 percent out of the Jewish National Home. No Jew has ever been permitted to reside in Trans-Jordan/Jordan.

Less than 25 percent then remained of Mandate Palestine, and even in this remnant, the British violated the Balfour and Mandate requirements for a "Jewish National Home" and for "close Jewish settlement". They progressively restricted where Jews could buy land, where they could live, build, farm or work.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel was finally able to settle some small part of those lands from which the Jews had been debarred by the British. Successive British governments regularly condemn their settlement as "illegal". In truth, it was the British who had acted illegally in banning Jews from these parts of the Jewish National Home.

WHO IS A PALESTINIAN?

During the period of the Mandate, it was the Jewish population that was known as "Palestinians" including those who served in the British Army in World War II.

British policy was to curtail their numbers and progressively limit Jewish immigration. By 1939, the White Paper virtually put an end to admission of Jews to Palestine. This policy was imposed the most stringently at the very time this Home was most desperately needed -- after the rise of Nazi power in Europe. Jews who might have developed the empty lands of Palestine and left progeny there, instead died in the gas chambers of Europe or in the seas they were trying to cross to the Promised Land.

At the same time that the British slammed the gates on Jews, they permitted or ignored massive illegal immigration into Western Palestine from Arab countries Jordan, Syria, Egypt, North Africa. In 1939, Winston Churchill noted that "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied . . . ." Exact population statistics may be problematic, but it seems that by 1947 the number of Arabs west of the Jordan River was approximately triple of what it had been in 1900.

The current myth is that these Arabs were long established in Palestine, until the Jews came and "displaced" them. The fact is, that recent Arab immigration into Palestine "displaced" the Jews. That the massive increase in Arab population was very recent is attested by the ruling of the United Nations: That any Arab who had lived in Palestine for two years and then left in 1948 qualifies as a "Palestinian refugees".

Casual use of population statistics for Jews and Arabs in Palestine rarely consider how the proportions came to be. One factor was the British policy of keeping out Jews while bringing in Arabs. Another factor was the violence used to kill or drive out Jews even where they had been long established.

For one example: The Jewish connection with Hebron goes back to Abraham, and there has been an Israelite/Jewish community there since Joshua long before it was King David's first capital. In 1929, Arab rioters with the passive consent of the British -- killed or drove out virtually the entire Jewish community.

For another example: In 1948, Trans-Jordan seized much of Judea and Samaria (which they called The West Bank) and East Jerusalem and the Old City. They killed or drove out every Jew.

It is now often proposed as a principle of international law and morality that all places that the British and the Arabs rendered Judenrein must forever remain so. In contrast, Israel eventually allotted 17 percent of Mandate Palestine has a large and growing population of Arab citizens.

FROM PALESTINE TO ISRAEL

What was to become of "Palestine" after the Mandate? This question was taken up by various British and international commissions and other bodies, culminating with the United Nations in 1947. During the various deliberations, Arab officials, spokesmen and writers expressed their views on "Palestine".

"There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. . . . Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it."
-- Local Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937

"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not"
-- Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian to Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1946

"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."
-- Delegate of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations Security Council, 1956,

By 1948, the Arabs had still not yet discovered their ancient nation of Falastin. When they were offered half of Palestine west of the Jordan River for a state, the offer was violently rejected. Six Arab states launched a war of annihilation against the nascent State of Israel. Their purpose was not to establish an independent Falastin. Their aim was to partition western Palestine amongst themselves.

They did not succeed in killing Israel, but Trans-Jordan succeeded in taking Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem, killing or driving out all the Jews who had lived in those places, and banning Jews of all nations from Jewish holy places. Egypt succeeded in taking the Gaza Strip. These two Arab states held these lands until 1967. Then they launched another war of annihilation against Israel, and in consequence lost the lands they had taken by war in 1948.

During those 19 years, 1948-1967, Jordan and Egypt never offered to surrendar those lands to make up an independent state of Falastin. The "Palestinians" never sought it. Nobody in the world ever suggested it, much less demanded it.

Finally, in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Movement was founded, with a charter that proclaimed its sole purpose to be the destruction of Israel. To that end it helped to precipitate the Arab attack on Israel in 1967.

The outcome of that attack then inspired an alteration in public rhetoric. As propaganda, it sounds better to speak of the liberation of Falastin than of the destruction of Israel. Much of the world, governments and media and public opinion, accept virtually without question of serious analysis the new-sprung myth of an Arab nation of Falastin, whose territory is unlawfully occupied by the Jews.

Since the end of World War I, the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa have been given independent states in 99.5 percent of the land they claimed. Lord Balfour once expressed his hope that when the Arabs had been given so much, they would "not begrudge" the Jews the "little notch" promised to them.

[Some of the material cited above is drawn from the book From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters.].

Source: This essay is from the 15 February issue of "Time to Speak", except the paragraphs from "Is Jordan Palerstine...1967" was contributed later to EretzYisroel.Org

I wish someone would post this on this rabble.ca website, it is so disgustingly anti Israel - pro-palestine, pro terrorist, anti US it makes me want to throw up. Every now and then I post something to stir it up, but if you disagree too much, they boot you off
http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=forum&f=28

And by the way, they have been discussing tactics to get at the right wing one of which is:
"the process of dominating a message board begins with establishing presence, controlling the space by starting and bumping threads, and generally making the resident righties understand you aren't going to be intimidated, and you aren't going away. "

We should beat them at their own game...