The all-too-frequent abuse of the word “Palestinian” to refer to Arabs gives me the heebie-jeebies. I cringe whenever I encounter it, especially from pro-Israel people.
With the perverse and detestable and bottomless skills of almost all bigots, its inventors have managed in a few short decades to reverse its original meaning.
Before Israeli Independence in 1948 and for years afterward, “Palestinian” meant Jew.
Before 1948, the Zionist newspaper now calling itself the Jerusalem Post was the “Palestine Post.” In the 1930s, Jewish musicians who fled Europe formed the “Palestine Symphony,” which performed its inaugural concert under the baton of world-famous conductor Arturo Toscanini.
Jews initiated the modernization of British Mandate Palestine when they founded the “Palestine Electric Company.” During World War 2, the British deployed the “Palestine Regiment” as part of the larger Jewish Brigade Group recruited primarily among Jews from the Mandate. In 1928, Jews formed the “Mandatory Palestine” national football team, which later became the Israeli national team, which these days fields Israeli Arabs along with Jews.
The Jewish use of the word “Palestine” reflected the fact that they were living under Britain’s “Palestine” Mandate, which obtained its name two thousand years ago. That’s when the Romans killed a million or more rebellious Jews in Judea and Samaria. The Romans added insult to massacre and renamed the land after the “Philistines,” a legendary Jewish enemy.
The notion that “Palestinians” means “Arabs” won acceptance only after 1948, not as a counterpart but in opposition to the Jewish presence in the land.
Historians trace its crystallization to 1964, when communists and jihadis formalized it and the UN ratified it.
“In a candid moment in 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, leader of the Ba’athist As-Saiqa faction of the PLO acknowledged, “’The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel ... the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.’”
Casting about for a theory to justify eradicating Jews, they found a solution which comes easy to all antisemites, who are by nature weak-minded and even weaker in originality: plagiarize.
Tom Lehrer sang how that works”
“Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize…”
Just as these Jew haters stole the word “Palestinian” from Jews, they stole Jewish history. Their “Palestinian” cause is in its essence a fun-house mirror reflection of the real-life Jewish one.
Political Zionism rests in part on the indisputable Jewish ties to the land, thousands of years old, as outlined in the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world.
“…Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain statehood. In recent decades, they returned in their masses. They reclaimed a wilderness, revived their language, built cities and villages, and established a vigorous and ever-growing community, with its own economic and cultural life. They sought peace, yet were ever prepared to defend themselves. They brought blessings of progress to all inhabitants of the country.”
Faced with this indisputable history, Arab “anti-Zionists” came up with their own ersatz facsimile of Jewish history which they teach in their schools and in which they immerse their propaganda. They claim:
• Modern Arab “Palestinians” are an uninterrupted continuation of the ancient indigenous allegedly “Arab” Canaanites and Jebusites and their kingdoms;
• “Palestinian” leaders from Arafat to Abbas deny any historical Jewish connection to the land—Jews were never there;
• Israel is “a colonial project that has nothing to do with Jews” or Judaism;
• No Jewish Temple ever existed, but if it did, it was in Yemen, and a mosque has sat on the so-called “Temple” Mount “since the creation of the world”;
• Jesus was a “Palestinian” and not a Jew.
In case anyone misses it, this final canard is the most direct possible assault on Christianity.
These fabrications now invade the history taught in our own schools and universities, especially in the many crackpot “Studies” departments which proliferate without mercy.
Their genocidal slogan, “From The River To The Sea” sums it up: no Jews, then, now or ever.
Any land controlled today by the “Palestinian” Authority is already judenfrei (Jew free) not only in fact but according to PA law.
In a legal notion intended to imitate authentic Jewish national, religious and cultural continuity, descendants of “Palestinian” refugees” from 1946-48 inherit a “refugee” status according to a bizarre legal doctrine which applies only to them and has never applied to any of the multitudes of other refugee groups in history.
By contrast the nearly one million Jews ethnically cleansed from Muslim countries during that same period were never classed as “refugees,” have never received any benefits, were never compensated for their stolen property, and inherit nothing.
Mostly they just moved to Israel and became its Mideastern Jewish majority.
Unlike the Muslim countries where they lived under a Jim Crow system, their Israeli government welcomes Muslims, Christians, and Druze to live in their territory and grants Arab citizens full civil rights, including a freedom rare in the Mideast, for Muslims to live either as Sunni or Shia.
Iranian Muslims jailed Bahai followers as heretics and murdered their leaders. The Bahai found refuge in the Jewish state.
These facts help explain why so many of the two million Arabs who live in Israel choose to call themselves “Arab Israelis” rather than “Palestinians.”
The Arabs who hold themselves out as “Palestinian” follow through on their hatreds. They have rejected every single one of the many offers for a “two-state solution.”
For example, in July 2000, Democrat U.S. President Bill Clinton offered an ideal version when he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat:
“Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth. He promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians (sic) a state on 96 % of the West Bank and 4% of Israel. And they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was, including, I will say it again, a capital in East Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the old city of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, and they said no. ️
“And I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians (sic). They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable. Well, I got news for them. They (the Jews) were there first. Before their faith (Islam) existed, they (the Jews) were there.”
(Check out Clinton’s remarks at this YouTube link.)
The permanent rejectionism from Arab leaders follows not only the fake history they invent but their personal greed. International bodies have rewarded them for their hatred with billions of dollars and lavish lifestyles:
Last we heard, the absentee Hamas leaders who enjoy luxury in Qatar or Turkey live even higher on the hog than Arafat’s widow in France.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld summed up the situation.
There is no balance in this equation. The communists and Arab leaders who have stolen from Jews the word “Palestinians” use the word not as a counterpart to the Jewish state but as its negation.
Of course, the notion of any “two-state solution” is fundamentally flawed when the founders of one of the purported two states will start it up with the express purpose of murdering the people who live in the other one.
The majority of Israelis have figured that out. That’s why they frustrate western leftists by continuing to vote for and to fight for their own survival.
What do they know that western leftists don’t?
To start with, to countenance and accept lies on the scale of the “Palestinian” hoax is a dead end for progress toward any permanent peace. It is to accept and promote a “big lie” on the scale promoted by the arch-Jew hater Hitler himself.
The trivialization of the lie is one of the most destructive consequences of the post-Marxist philosophies labeled as “post-modernism” and of its Marxist and Marxesque predecessors.
Every story is not a mere “narrative.”
This trivialization of the lie is a direct attack on western civilization, including the American founding, which was rooted in Jewish and Christian teachings which hold truth as one of the highest possible values.
Our founders based our American nation on “truths” which are “self-evident,” not on lies which are convenient.
It was John Adams who reminded a hostile Boston jury in his successful defense of the British soldiers charged after the “Boston Massacre,”
Which brings up the current claim common to the Left that their “struggle” for their “Palestine” represents the perfect intersection and encapsulation of the Left’s entire existence. Affirmations like these abound on campus and in DSA struggle sessions:
• “Palestine is the heart of the anti-imperialist struggle”;
• “Palestine will save us all”;
• “Palestine teaches the left…”
Obnoxious, actually, but true. The “Palestine” hoax is just as dishonest and hostile to civilization as their entire hoax agenda. It suits them right down to the ground.
As Voltaire wrote in 1765,
“Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde, est en droit de vous rendre injuste.”
Which translates to something like,
“Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”
These days, quoters frequently substitute the word “atrocities” for Voltaire’s original
“injuste.”
I’ll take either word. Or both.
The “Palestine” hoax is the absurdity. The rapes and massacre of October 7, 2023, were not only the injustice but the atrocity—along with every other act or word of Jew hatred in Israel, in Europe, or here at home in America.
Max Cossack lives with his wife Susan in a dusty little village in Arizona with two cats who lack the intellect to lie, even in service to their favorite narratives, which usually involve “treats,” a human word they recognize.
Also, in case you missed it, in his novel Where There Is No Man, an American must deal with the risk of being murdered by jihadis. It is available in eBook or paperback on Amazon along with his ten other novels. One reader describes the novel this way: “”Fascinating...This installment surprised me. It is a fascinating study in the generational effectiveness of propaganda that bodes ill for our current generation.”
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