Who are the Palestinians

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday July 15, 2002 07:56 by Mary - none

Encyclopedia of Peace

Frequently Asked Questions:
Are the Palestinians native to the land where Israel now exists?
So why did so many Arabs end up in Palestine?
So before the creation of the State of Israel, who were the Palestinians?
What was the identity of the Arabs of Palestine at the end of the Ottoman Empire?
Are the Palestinians a separate and unique people, different from the other Arabs? When did the notion arise - of the Palestinians as a separate Arab people?
What was the initial reaction of the Arabs of Palestine to this new and separate national identity?
Who is the real enemy of the Palestinian Arabs?
What will be the function of the new 'secular, democratic' Palestinian state?

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Are the Palestinians native to the land where Israel now exists?

"The fact is that today's Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today's Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. The civil and tribal wars between Yemmenites (from Yemen) and Kessites (from Banu Kais of Saudi Arabia) ... are well known among Palestinians.
"My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to 30,000 inhabitants."

- Walid, a Palestinian Arab defector, talking about the recent immigration of Arabs to Palestine.
quoted from "Answering Islam"

The current PLO and Arab claim (and mainstream media regurgitation of it) is indeed a very distorted version of `recorded history' and can only qualify as pure Orwellian propaganda. In fact, putting aside all the myths and propaganda, the only area that would qualify historically as truly Arab land, is the Arabian desert peninsula. Unfortunately, it seems that Goebbels was correct in stating that if a lie were repeated often enough, it would come to be "perceived" as truth.

No doubt, some Arabs have lived in the area of the Mandate of Palestine for many centuries, but not as many of them as had the Jews. What is more, Jews had lived in Arab lands since times preceding Islam itself. And yet, these Jews in Arab lands were never regarded as citizens of the Arab lands they lived in and were unceremoniously expelled in the years subsequent to Israel's establishment. In other words, residency alone did not confer national rights on those who inhabited an area. Nor did it make a people out of congeries of Arabs and other nationalities that had come to the area of the Mandate of Palestine while the Jewish people were restricted. The nations of the world recognized this after World War I when the League of Nations determined that the geographical area called Palestine was to become a homeland for the Jewish people, the people that had been continuously associated with this land since ancient times when it was known as Judea and Samaria.
- David Basch

So why did so many Arabs end up in Palestine?

During the British Mandate, even well into the 1940s, Arabs were allowed into "Palestine" in huge numbers without visa or passport, especially from the Hauran District of Syria, while the British continued to do everything possible to prevent Jews from entering, even down to the last minute when all attempts were made to deny entry to thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Only in 1948 were Jewish refugees allowed free entry to their homeland, and that was because Israel had, once again, become an independent nation.

[The Arabs of Ottoman Palestine may have] had certain attachments to the fields they were cultivating but at the same time they were destroying the Land. Parkes stated that "in the wars between villages it was far too common a practice to cut down fruit trees and olives and to destroy crops, and this in the end caused as much loss of life through hunger as was caused by the actual casualties of fighting". He concluded that "in spite of the immense fertility of the soil, it is probable that in the first half of the nineteenth century the population sank to the lowest level it had ever known in historic times".

Palestinian leaders claim that Israel is built on Arab land, when the truth is that eyewitnesses such as Mark Twain and Rev. Manning of England who visited the Holy Land in the last century wrote that the land was barren and empty. The population then was less that 5% of today's population.
In fact Joan Peters in her book "From Time Immemorial" tells us that the return of the Jews in 1800's and early 1900's created jobs and Arabs from impoverished areas were drawn into the Holy Land for work. Peters also tells us that in 1948 so many Arabs were new to the area and could not qualify for the UN requirement for refugee status (people forced to leave "permanent" or "habitual" homes) that they added a clause permitting refugee status for Arabs who had been there as little as two years.

Thus the Zionist slogan "The Land without a people for the people without a land" was absolutely correct. The slogan did not mean that there were no inhabitants at all in Palestine, it just indicated that the non-Jewish population constituted a conglomeration of dozens of heterogeneous groups of residents having very little in common, i.e. not constituting a single nation, a people. These residents were not united by any specific national idea. Parkes wrote that the Balfour declaration for the first time established a "unit called Palestine on a political map. ...There was no such thing historically as a 'Palestinian Arab', and there was no feeling of unity among 'the Arabs' of this newly defined area".

So before the creation of the State of Israel, who were the Palestinians?

Until 1950, the name of the Jerusalem Post was THE PALESTINE POST; the journal of the Zionist Organization of America was NEW PALESTINE; Bank Leumi was the ANGLO-PALESTINE BANK; the Israel Electric Company was the PALESTINE ELECTRIC COMPANY; there was the PALESTINE FOUNDATION FUND and the PALESTINE PHILHARMONIC. All these were Jewish organizations. In America, Zionist youngsters sang "PALESTINE, MY PALESTINE", "PALESTINE SCOUT SONG" and "PALESTINE SPRING SONG" In general, the terms Palestine and Palestinian referred to the region of Palestine as it was. Thus "Palestinian Jew" and "Palestinian Arab" are straightforward expressions. "Palestine Post" and "Palestine Philharmonic" refer to these bodies as they existed in a place then known as Palestine. The adoption of a Palestinian identity by the Arabs of Palestine is a recent phenomenon. Until the establishment of the State of Israel, and for another decade or so, the term Palestinian applied almost exclusively to the Jews.

What was the identity of the Arabs of Palestine at the end of the Ottoman Empire?

On August 11, 1919 in a memorandum to Lord Curzon, Lord Balfour stated that "whatever be the future of Palestine, it is not now an 'independent nation,' nor is it yet on the way to becoming one". Professor of history Reverend James Parkes wrote in Whose Land that "before 1914, ... the mass of the population [in Palestine] had no real feeling of belonging to any wider unit than their village, clan or possibly confederation of clans". He stressed the point that "up to that time it is not possible to speak of the existence of any general sentiment of nationality".
A Palestinian Arab, Professor of history Rashid Khalidi recently confirmed Balfour's and Parkes' statements that the population of Palestine at the beginning of this century did not represent a distinct nation. In his book Palestinian Identity, he wrote that only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the Arabs of Palestine start to see "themselves as part of other communities, both larger and smaller ones. This identification certainly did not include all sectors or classes of the population. But it did constitute a new and powerful category of identity that was simply nonexistent a generation or two before, and was still novel and limited in its diffusion before World War I".

...the non-Jewish residents of Palestine tried to don several different identities. First, they attempted to become Ottomans. This attempt failed after the defeat of the Ottoman army and subsequent withdrawal of Ottoman authority from Palestine. As Khalidi wrote, "in a period of a few years, Ottomanism as an ideology went from being one of the primary sources of identification for Palestinians, to having no apparent impact at all". Then came the turn of the Syrian identity that did not last long either. When the French crushed the two-year-old independent Syrian state in 1920, the elite of the Palestinian Arabs decided to change orientation again. Khalidi quotes the nationalist leader Musa Kazim Pasa al-Husayni, who said, "Now, 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".
It is important to note that the nationalist movement among the non-Jewish residents of Palestine did not originate on its soil, but was imported from Egypt, Turkey and France. Parkes wrote that it was "exclusively political in the narrowest sense, and showed little awareness of the day-to-day problems which would arise if its political objective were reached". Illiterate fellahen became the pawns in the game of power-thirsty Arab nationalists who tried to repeat King Abdulla's success in Jordan at a smaller scale in the remaining part of Palestine.

Are the Palestinians a separate and unique people, different from the other Arabs? When did the notion arise - of the Palestinians as a separate Arab people?

There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of 1 percent of the landmass.
But that's too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today. Greed. Pride. Envy. Covetousness. No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough.

- Joseph Farah, Arab-American journalist,
editor and CEO of WorldNetDaily

The concept of "Palestinians" is one that did not exist until about 1948, when the Arab inhabitants, of what until then was Palestine, wished to differentiate themselves from the Jews. Until then, the Jews were the Palestinians. There was the Palestinian Brigade of Jewish volunteers in the British World War II Army (at a time when the Palestinian Arabs were in Berlin hatching plans with Adolf Hitler for world conquest and how to kill all the Jews); there was the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra (all Jews, of course); there was The Palestine Post; and so much more.
The Arabs who now call themselves "Palestinians" do so in order to persuade a misinformed world that they are a distinct nationality and that "Palestine" is their ancestral homeland. But they are no distinct nationality at all. They are the same - in language, custom, and tribal and family ties - as the Arabs of Syria, Jordan, and beyond. There is no more difference between the "Palestinians" and the other Arabs of those countries than there is between, say, the citizens of Minnesota and those of Wisconsin.

What's more, many of the "Palestinians", or their immediate ancestors, came to the area attracted by the prosperity created by the Jews, in what previously had been pretty much of a wasteland.

- New York Times, June 12, 2000 (via CFICEJ's ISRAEL REPORT May/June 2000)

Meeting in Cairo in 1964, the Arab League resolved to divert the waters of the Jordan River, which are vital for Israel's existence. At that same conference, there was a public declaration of the intention to destroy Israel, and the PLO was founded.
- Anita Shapira, The New Republic, 29 November, 1999

It is mainly in the past few decades that "Palestinian" has been co-opted by the Arabs, as if the name belongs exclusively to them, pretending to have a long history and independent national identity. Until 1967, most of those who now call themselves Palestinians were reasonably happy with their Jordanian citizenship and with calling themselves "Jordanians" Even today, there is strong support among the "Palestinian" majority of Jordan for their Hashemite monarchy, though King Hussein relies on his Bedouin troops when he needs absolute loyalty.
The use of a term like "Palestinian" without the suffix "Arab" and the term "Israeli-Occupied Palestine" have served to confuse the public into thinking that there has always been an independent "Palestinian" people which hasn't been given the opportunity for self-determination. In fact, any such failure has been the fault of the government of Jordan, which covers the majority of what was once known as "Palestine" and in which the majority of Palestinian Arabs live.

"Palestinians" [are an] Arab people no one heard of before 1967 before Israeli governments certified this piece of propaganda... As has been noted many times before, prior to 1948, that is before Jews had begun to call themselves Israelis, the only persons known as "Palestinians" were Jews, with the Arabs much preferrring to identify themselves as part of the great Arab nation.
- David Basch

The actual word "Palestine" came from the Romans, not the Arabs, and there has never been an independent country or state of Palestine, nor a Palestinian rule. Yet we are led to believe that there are Palestinians and then there are Arabs.

Avi Erlich wrote in his book Ancient Zionism, A Palestinian Arab claim to the Land of Israel cannot rise above a claim to houses, lost from the larger Arab Empire. Neither Moorish homes in Cordoba nor Arab homes in Jerusalem can reasonably constitute lost nations. ...Homeland represents the grafting of a specific place with a specific national idea. No Palestinian idea beyond the claim to land or other lost property has ever been articulated. Borrowed and usurping nationhood does not count.

Palestine has always constituted a single geographical, political and demographic unit with Greater Syria and Egypt. On its soil the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt intermingled. Palestine also witnessed, as a land bridge linking Asia, Africa, and Europe, several movements and waves of conquerors who dominated it for different periods of time and left behind varying degrees of influence.
- By Abdul Jawad Saleh, in Transformation of Palestine, printed in Challenge, February 1995, published on the WWW by the Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society, Bir Zeit University, the West Bank

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."

"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."
- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, to the Peel Commission, 1937

"Palestine was part of the Province of Syria...
...politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity."
- The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted this in a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947

"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."
- Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council

The Romans had changed the name of the Land of Israel to "Palestine." But from A.D. 640 until the 1960s, Arabs referred to this same Land as "Southern Syria." Arabs only started calling the Land "Palestine" in the 1960s. Until about the eighteenth century, the Christian world called this same Land, "The Holy Land." Thereafter, they used two names: "The Holy Land" and "Palestine." When the League of Nations in 1922 gave Great Britain the mandate to prepare Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, the official name of the Land became "Palestine" and remained so until the rebirth of the Israeli State in 1948. During this very period, the leaders of the Arabs in the Land, however, called themselves Southern Syrians and clamored that the Land become a part of a "Greater Syria." This "Arab Nation" would include Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan as well as Palestine. An observation in TIME magazine well articulated how the Palestinian identity was born so belatedly in the 1960s:

Golda Meir once argued that there was no such thing as a Palestinian; at the time, she wasn't entirely wrong. Before Arafat began his proselytizing, most of the Arabs from the territory of Palestine thought of themselves as members of an all-embracing Arab nation. It was Arafat who made the intellectual leap to a definition of the Palestinians as a distinct people; he articulated the cause, organized for it, fought for it and brought it to the world's attention.

If there was an Arab Palestinian culture, a normal population increase over the centuries would have been expected. But with the exception of a relatively few families, the Arabs had no attachment to the Land. If Arabs from southern Syria drifted into Palestine for economic reasons, within a generation or so the cultural tug of Syria or other Arab lands would pull them back. This factor is why the Arab population average remained low until the influx of Jewish financial investments and Jewish people in the late 1800s made the Land economically attractive. Then sometime between 1850 and 1918, the Arab population shot up to 560,000. Not to absolve the Jews but to defend British policy, the not overfriendly British secretary of state for the colonies, Malcolm MacDonald, declared in the House of Commons (November 24, 1938), "The Arabs cannot say that the Jews are driving them out of the country. If not a single Jew had come to Palestine after 1918, I believe the Arab population of Palestine would still have been around 600,000. . ."

Because Arabs until the 1960s spoke of Palestine as Southern Syria or part of Greater Syria, in 1919 the General Syrian Congress stated, "We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine." In 1939 George Antonius noted the Arab view of Palestine in 1918:

Faisal's views about the future of Palestine did not differ from those of his father and were identical with those held then by the great majority of politically-minded Arabs. The representative Arab view was substantially that which King Husain [Grand Sherif of Mecca, the great grandfather of the current King Hussein of Jordan] had expressed to the British Government. . . in January 1918. In the Arab view, Palestine was an Arab territory forming an integral part of Syria.

Referring to the same Arab view of Palestine in 1939, George Antonius spoke of "the whole of the country of that name [Syria] which is now split up into mandated territories..." His lament was that France's mandate over Syria did not include Palestine which was under Britain's mandate.

Syrian President Hafez Assad once told PLO leader Yassir Arafat:

You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian People, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.

Assad stated on March 8, 1974, "Palestine is a principal part of Southern Syria, and we consider that it is our right and duty to insist that it be a liberated partner of our Arab homeland and of Syria."

In the words of the late military commander of the PLO as well as member of the PLO Executive Council, Zuhair Muhsin:

There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity....yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.

The following are significant observations by Christians of the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s:

The Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants, cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it.

Stephen Olin, D.D., L.L.D., called one of the most noted of American theologians after his extensive travels in the Middle East wrote of the Arabs in Palestine "...with slight exceptions they are probably all descendants of the old inhabitants of 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.

...the Arab leadership realized how much more effective they could make their efforts to "throw the Jews into the sea" if they became Palestinians rather than Arabs. By then, the Jews of this country (the only people called Palestinians before the War of Independence) were named Israelis. Even The Palestine Post became The Jerusalem Post. By adopting the name 'Palestinians' the Arabs succeeded in converting the Arab-Israeli conflict from a war of annihilation against the Jewish population to a struggle of dispossessed natives against colonialist invaders. It was a spectacularly effective canard, eventually adopted by Israel's own fiction weavers, the 'new historians.'
- David Bar-Illan, The Jerusalem Post, 'Eye on the Media', November 5, 1999

What was the initial reaction of the Arabs of Palestine to this new and separate national identity?

...after the Six-Day War, when Yasser Arafat and Fatah tried to establish their infrastructures in what they referred to as the West Bank they were rejected by the Arabs themselves. Neil Livingstone and David Halevy wrote in Inside the PLO, "The effort, however, turned out to be one of Fatah's greatest failures, not so much because of Israeli efficiency in ferreting out the secret network as because of Palestinian apathy. At that point many Palestinians living in the West Bank were actually relieved to be out from under the oppressive yoke of Jordanian rule and simply wanted to find some kind of accommodation with the Israelis. Within months Arafat was forced to leave the West Bank on the run".
The Arab leaders are well aware of the fragility of the Palestinian identity for the majority of the Palestinian Arabs. This is the main reason why they have not allowed the Palestinian Arabs living in the refugee camps, for almost half a century, to intermingle with Arabs of their countries. Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri confirmed this on February 5, 1998 in an interview with London MBC Television. He said the following; "We do not want to fall into the trap of resettling the Palestinians. This would lead to resettling the Palestinian refugees and their eventual assimilation. The Palestinians themselves have consistently rejected this approach so that their cause and characteristic identity might not be lost".

When Al-Hariri said, "the Palestinians themselves rejected this approach", he missed one important word - leaders. It is the Palestinian leaders who try to prevent the assimilation of the Arabs among the Arabs. It is the Palestinian leaders who today more and more openly declare the Israeli Arabs to be their "property", to be an unquestionable part of the "Palestinian people". If Israel does not confront this dangerous tendency she arrives at an extremely perilous situation. There is a way to deal with this matter. Edward Said wrote that, "Unlike other peoples who suffered from a colonial experience, the Palestinians do not primarily feel that they have been exploited but that they have been excluded, denied the right to have a history of their own". Israel has an excellent chance to mend this problem. As was stated earlier, the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine tried to take on several different identities; none of them brought relief or happiness, most likely because all of them were artificial.

Who is the real enemy of the Palestinian Arabs?

"Arafat himself is one of the world's foremost terrorists. He knows it, we know it, and he knows that we know it. So what's he up to? Muddying the waters, that's what.... The [Jerusalem marketplace] massacre was, he said, nothing to do with him. But where's the evidence the Israelis are trying to starve the Palestinians into submission? There isn't any. Where's the evidence the Israelis have a siege mentality against the Palestinians? Again, there isn't any. The truth is ... the Arab world has repeatedly tried to destroy the only democratic nation in the entire Middle East. If Arafat wants he can make a legitimate deal with the Israelis right now and end the so-called 'state terrorism' against his people. Yet instead he prefers to use his own people as pawns in his own cunning, devious game. It is Arafat himself, not the Israeli people, who is the enemy of the Palestinians."
- Editorial (Canada's Calgary Sun, Aug 12, 1997)

What will be the function of the new 'secular, democratic' Palestinian state?

First of all, who really believes that a Palestinian state will be either secular or democratic?

A secular Islam ...is a contradiction in terms; in the Middle East, the idea of a secular State is merely a weapon recently added to the armoury of the PLO.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"

"We are slowly and dangerously moving towards a police state where intimidation and threats become the norm instead of the rule of law."
- Daoud Kuttab, a prominent Arafat supporter and Palestinian journalist, after he was fired from his job for signing a petition protesting the P.L.O.'s decision to shut down a pro-Jordanian newspaper (Reuters, 6 August 1994)

"I am not Mr. Chairman. I am His Excellency, the President of Palestine."
- Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the P.L.O., in response to a greeting by Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt (Jerusalem Post, 17 December 1993)